Rescheduling is now in the air

Airlines pulling out all stops to maximise aircraft utilisation

BANGALORE: Airlines have increasingly started looking at pulling back, combining or rescheduling flights if they are not commercially viable for over three months on a sustained basis.

This is helping them check profuse bleeding and maximise their aircraft utilisation.

Jet has withdrawn two night flights to Kolkata and Bangalore sectors over the past six months because they were not able to get enough load on these flights. SpiceJet has also cancelled 4-5 flights during the same period.

Kingfisher Airlines did the same with its Ahmedabad-Jammu flight when the demand refused to pick up even after operating on the route for six months.

“As a rule, full-service carriers are constantly juggling their flights on a daily basis either by combining them or rescheduling them. However, certainly if a flight does not recover the variable cost for more than three months, then it is best to pull back that flight altogether and deploy the aircraft on a profitable route to ensure optimum utilisation of your aircraft,” said a senior Jet Airways official.

That is what SpiceJet did with its Delhi-Kolkata flight, which flew via Guwahati. It knocked out the Delhi-Kolkata flight and retained the Guwhati-Kolkata-Guwahati flight.

“We did that because there was overcapacity on the Delhi-Kolkata route,” said Kamal Hingorani, vice-president, marketing and planning, SpiceJet Ltd.

Once, the airline gets delivery of more aircraft in August, it plans to resume the Delhi-Kolkata flight. The budget carrier pulled back its Mumbai-Delhi flight a week ago as one its aircraft has gone for maintenance.

Kingfisher Airlines general manager Manoj Chacko feels that, very often, such route rationalisation is the fallout of consolidation, where one airline ends up having too many flights in a single sector.

“Jet and Sahara together have around nine departures on the Mumbai-Kolkata route. They have 19 flights between Mumbai and Delhi. This way you tend to cannibalise your business and have to go route rationalisation for better utilisation of your assets,” says Chacko.

Then, there are instances of airlines postponing or advancing flight timing to commercial reasons. Kingfisher had to push the departure timing of one of its flights on the Bangalore sector from 16.30 (4.30 pm) to 18.20 (6.20pm).

“Just by altering the timing, we made the flight commercially more viable,” says Chacko.